A GIANT CATFISH ON THE PIER. Maggi noodles alone weren’t enough to satisfy me. I needed meat or fish and plenty of it but not being a pay week I had to get it from somewhere else but not from the soup kitchen at Saint Vincent’s Hostel. I said to the Pomfrets, how about going fishing from the river bank? Where do you want to go? Riverside Drive I said, to the Sailing Club, there’s a jetty down there where the University Ferry comes to get passengers for Toowong and Saint Lucia. We took our bikes in the evening. Bill brought his fishing rod and I brought the jar of bate with my fishing gear in the carton on the carrier of my bicycle. It had to be my lucky day or night for that matter and I’ll tell you why. When we came on the pier, I saw this giant Catfish sitting there and it was alive. How it came to be on the pier nobody knows, it may have been thrown up by the high tide earlier because the tide was going out and was down to half tide. The Catfish was one meter in length. I believe that God put it there for me to find because it was God’s Will that I find it and take it home to eat. We tried and tried but nothing could be caught and we lost all the bait. What now? Estelle asked. Let us go home I said, I don’t intend staying out all night anyway, this can be a dangerous area after midnight. You taking the fish? Bill asked. I sure am I said, there must be at least five kilograms of meat there and it’s still alive. You can have it Bill said, we don’t like Catfish. Help me put it in the box please, and Bill helped me to lift it up into the carton, he held the box on the shopping basket in the front of the bicycle while I strapped it up with the rubber belts. On arrival home, they went inside while I untied the box and carried it to the kitchen where I cleaned the fish out straight away and put it in the ice box of my fridge, it filled up the ice box but I must have used a kilo of salt to clean the slime off. Whenever I wanted to eat fried fish I cut steaks from it acrossways starting from the tail and the meat was tasty and very satisfying. There were too many entrails from the gutt of the fish for the jam jar so I put them in a celefane and froze them up to use for bait next time. I had enough fish to eat for one week up to the pension before I started eating the Maggi Noodles again. We went down for two more nights but nothing could be caught. However I kept all the bait and froze it up again for future use. The old bait jar was washed out and I put it into my cart to be sold as broken glass. When pension came, we all went to Jack The Slasher’s Supermarket for our shopping, the Pomfrets got a loaded trolley of groceries that they didn’t intend to buy so most of them had to be returned back to the shelves for sale. I got two cartons for myself. One box of my groceries started breaking up and things started falling off but I managed to get it together and we walked home with our bikes but we got very sweaty because the night was hot. Once at home, groceries were put away and we all had to take another shower, the second for the evening to get all the sweat off. Those two never bought enough groceries but wasted all their money. Pepsi started selling up the Tristrams drinks through various corner stores. I’ll tell about that next and show how the ancient bottles were disposed of.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 07:35:25 +0000
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